


One Day

by Rìgh_Marbh (Righ_Marbh)



Series: Pride of the Summer [2]
Category: Frey & McGray Series - Oscar de Muriel
Genre: About as domestic as you’re likely to get for this pair, M/M, More of a snapshot than anything
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-06
Updated: 2019-08-06
Packaged: 2020-08-10 14:02:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 978
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20136640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Righ_Marbh/pseuds/R%C3%ACgh_Marbh
Summary: After a year Ian thinks that things may, against all odds, have begun to settle down. Normality is a far off dream when he lives with someone like McGray but maybe, just maybe, it’s not too terrible.





	One Day

**Author's Note:**

> Well in honour of the fact that we’re getting a new godsbedamned book in a couple of days, I decided to kick myself up the arse a bit and finish all all the little Ficlets and bollocks I had lying around from this AU and collect them into a wee series. 
> 
> I can’t promise coherence, common sense or continuity because I am bad at maths.

_One year later._

Whatever his misgivings about the department, of which the legality of the situation was still the most prominent, Ian does have to admit that it has put an end to the pervasive sense of self-pity that had been hanging around the house.

The worst part, as it turns out, is that Adolphus McGray is an absolute shit to live with.

When he was still lost in the miasma of grief (though Ian knows full well that _that_ never truly lifted, McGray still looks like he’s being followed around by a little black cloud a lot of the time), some of his sheer scale was diminished but now Ian is constantly reminded by just how much he fills a space and it is driving him absolutely spare.

“Would it kill you, just once, not to leave open jars of formaldehyde in the kitchen?”

McGray is buried somewhere under a delivery of several antique books - and the study is slowly dissolving from a well-curated shambles into a bombsite - and when he finally emerges, Ian can’t help that traitorous little skip in is heart.

Because McGray is an absolute shit but his hair is covered in dust and he’s wearing that infuriating lopsided grin (though it hasn’t quite managed to reach his eyes in a long time now) and _fuck_ he’s gorgeous.

“Where should I leave them then?”

“You have an office, perhaps let them suffer the consequences of being stupid enough to hire you.”

“And let ye miss out on the consequences ae being stupid enough tae live wi me?”

If Ian had a penny for every time he wanted to throw something, he…well, he was already a wealthy man but the point still stood.

“You’re going to poison us all one of these days…what is it this week?”

There was a thin manila file lying open on the desk with post-it notes sticking out at odd angles.

“Och, it’s jist weird lights out in the Forth.” McGray has learned, remarkably quickly, not to mention any of his personal theories to Ian unless he really wants them argued with. “Even I reckon it’s nothing though…Mossmorran’s been flaring non-stop fir the last two weeks, ye can even see it fae the attic window.”

Coming from _him_, it’s a reasonable answer but Ian’s eyes narrow at the mention of the attic.

“Why on earth were you up there?”

He’d seen it once - dusty and cobwebbed and now full of all of the things that McGray couldn’t bring himself to look at anymore. If he’d been rooting around up there then it could only be for some hint as to what happened to Amy. Ian braced himself.

“Calm down, I needed tae find the lease fir this place. Ardglass has been at my fucking throat again.”

Ian couldn’t bite back the groan as he dropped into the worn leather armchair by the fireplace. Lady Anne Ardglass was becoming a rather significant nuisance in her dogged determination to turf McGray out of a house that she still considered hers, despite a whole parade of lawyers telling her otherwise.

“She’s not likely to show up on the doorstep again?”

“No if she kens whit’s gid fir her. Mind you, ye fair took the sting out ae her last time.”

Ian is quite certain that he’s never going to be allowed to live that one down.

“Yes and look how that backfired.”

Two days after his encounter with her, he’d received a letter - a letter, not a phone call or an email or anything remotely sensible, a handwritten goddamned _letter_ \- from his father demanding to know why one of his former clients was writing to tell him his son had been found in the company of a notorious lunatic.

“Ye could jist tell them yer here, ye ken.”

It wasn’t an _argument_ as such but McGray had never quite gotten his head around the elaborate lies that Ian has set up to prevent his family from discovering that he was not, in fact, still living in Glasgow.

“It’s more complicated than that.”

So long as Ian had a degree of plausible deniability, Elgie still had a safe haven. So long as it all looked…well, normal was probably pushing it a little, but so long as it didn’t look like _something_, his family were broadly inclined to assume it was _nothing_.

“I’m not embarrassed…before you start that again.”

Embarrassment was too simple a feeling. He was…defensive. What they had here, in the safety of this house was special. It was a tangled mess of arguments and snark and no small amount of concern but it was something that Ian didn’t particularly want to have to explain or justify to the outside world.

McGray, who has extracted himself from his fortress of manuscripts, leans over Ian on the chair, hovering rather infuriatingly just out of reach.

“Ye might want tae tell yer face that then…else I’m gonnae start thinking yer taking our Lady Glass’ offer seriously.”

His expression is serious, nearly pensive, but his tone is just as mocking as it was every time he brought up the fact that Ardglass had all but thrown her granddaughter at Ian’s feet in a wedding gown.

“Yes, thank you for reminding me.”

The thinly veiled threat to out him to the rest of his family had been followed up for the letter to his father casually mentioning that she had met him in McGray’s company. The old woman might have been meddlesome but she had a shrewd mind and an uncanny knack for twisting the knives in at just the right place. 

“Ye’d make a fine couple, right enough.”

“Bite me.”

In hindsight, the chair was really not big enough for the two of them and Ian really should have realised that McGray was going to take up the offer.


End file.
